Cultural Exchanges between Brazil and France

Brazil and France have explored each other's geographical and cultural landscapes for more than five hundred years. The Brazilian je ne sais quoi has captivated the French from their first encounter, and the ingenuity à francesa of French artistic and scholarly movements has intrigued Brazilians in kind. Ongoing Brazil-France interactions have resulted in some of the richest cultural exchanges between Europe and Latin America. In Cultural Exchanges between Brazil and France, leading international scholars evaluate these reciprocal transnational explorations, from the earliest French interventions in Brazil in the sixteenth century to the growing mutual influence that the nations have exerted on one another in the twenty-first century. Original interdisciplinary essays examine cross-cultural interactions and collaborations in the social sciences, intellectual history, the press, literature, cinema, plastic arts, architecture, cartography, and sport. The comparative cultural method used in these analyses deepens the collective treatment of crucial junctures in the long history of often harmonious, but also sometimes ambivalent and occasionally contentious, encounters between Brazil and France.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781612494616

Book preview

Introduction to Cultural Exchanges

between Brazil and France

Regina R. Félix and Scott D. Juall

Cultural Exchanges between Brazil and France addresses enduring interactions between Brazil and France that have been evoked in the appeal of the Brazilian all-natural je ne sais quoi that has long captivated the French and the ingenuity of artistic and scholarly movements formulated à francesa that have interested Brazilians. Exchanges between Brazil and France have existed for several centuries through geographical and cultural explorations that have been frequently complementary but also intermittently clashing. The volume begins by evaluating accounts of the earliest French interventions in Brazil and develops into revealing the growing effects that the nations have exerted on each other. Scholars contributing to Cultural Exchanges between Brazil and France treat crucial junctures in such relations, bringing together a wide variety of discourses into their comparative cultural studies. Through their original interdisciplinary analytical approaches, contributors examine cross-cultural interactions and collaborations between Brazil and France in architecture, cinema, intellectual history, literature, plastic arts, social sciences, and sports by undertaking analyses of significant topics in the long history of harmonious, but also ambivalent and occasionally contentious, encounters between Brazil and France.

Decisive Stages in Exchanges between Brazil and France

The earliest encounters between the French and Brazilians arose in the relationships that they developed in commercial trade during the first half of the sixteenth century. The Tupinambá, native inhabitants living along the eastern coast of Brazil, were engaged in the barter of goods managed by the French that included tropical fauna, feathers, cotton, and other commodities, exchanged for items deemed ordinary by the French, such as mirrors, beads, knives, hatchets, and fish hooks. The introduction of iron tools in particular made a decisive impact on the sociopolitical organization of the Tupi. Especially important for the French was the commerce in brazilwood, which was harvested and prepared solely by Amerindians and shipped to Europe for use as a dye in France’s textile manufacturing industry. Revenue from this commerce supported the growth of France’s mercantilism, which in turn funded continuing exploratory and commercial voyages to Brazil. Contemporary maps, atlases, and other visual artworks, which French cartographers and artists created to represent the developing business between the French and the indigenous Brazilians, are testimony to how advantageous this trade was for France; and they also attest to the commercial interdependence between Brazil and France.

The first overtly political relationship between Brazil and France developed in the mid-sixteenth century. In 1555, King Henry II, challenging Portugal’s exclusive claims to Brazil as dictated by the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, sent France’s first colonial mission to Brazil, named by the French la France Antarctique (Antarctic France), where colonists settled on the Isle-des-Françoys (Isle of the French, today’s Ilha de Villegagnon) in Guanabara Bay, near Rio de Janeiro. Led by Admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, this colonial venture lasted five years and resulted in more explicit cultural production about the Tupinambá, whom French travelers depicted in written narratives and engravings. André Thevet’s account of the early stages of the colonial expedition, Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique (1557), is exemplary, as it introduced, in both writing and woodcuts, a vision of Brazilians as anthropophagous savages, whose culture and fallen state were to be lamented and criticized by Catholic Western Europeans. The French were therefore the first Europeans to systematically construct the Brazilian Amerindian textually. And thus the French colonial impulse was doubly reinforced, as narratives and images portraying the natives’ barbarism and need for conversion to Christianity became as important as the acquisition and exporting of key resources for European consumers.

Jean de Léry, a Huguenot who joined Villegagnon’s colony one year after Thevet’s departure from Brazil in 1556, greatly developed his compatriot’s conceptions of Brazilian society. In his ethnographic masterpiece Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (five editions, 1578-1611), Léry probes more deeply into the sociocultural practices of the Tupinambá and his investigation leads him to reconsider relationships between France and Brazil during this initial colonial period. One of Léry’s rhetorical strategies in Histoire d’un voyage includes frequent direct quotation of the Tupinambá, who respond orally to the French colonists, in order to evaluate and condemn several elements of European civilization, including greed, inequality, and superfluity. The Calvinist also expands conventional observations on the Tupinambá’s anthropophagic consumption of their enemies captured in war in order to criticize contemporary French society. According to Léry, the French far surpass in cruelty the natives of Brazil with the savage acts carried out during the bloody Wars of Religion that pitted Catholics and Protestants against each other between 1562 and 1598.

The most widely known of sixteenth-century French reflections on Brazilian culture and society—and their changing conceptions in France—are found in Michel de Montaigne’s celebrated essay Des cannibales (1580). Drawing on travel narratives and eyewitness testimonies reporting French expeditions in Brazil, Montaigne advances an even stronger critique of the French in his condemnation of France’s self-destructive barbarity during the long series of civil wars. He denounces the excesses of French society—notably those of the royal court—which he enacts, as Léry before him, through the appropriated perspective of the natives. The essayist describes a face-to-face discussions between King Charles IX and three members of the Tupinambá tribe, who were among hundreds who had been brought to France after one of the colonial expeditions to Guanabara Bay to participate in the king’s joyeuse entrée (joyous entry) into Rouen in 1562. Montaigne, who adds further legitimacy to his critique of the French through his citation of the Tupinambá during this political encounter, is the first French writer to convey judgments of the French stated by indigenous Brazilians immersed in the tense political and sociocultural atmosphere of contemporary France. Léry and Montaigne therefore laid the groundwork for what Frank Lestringant has called a sociological revolution by which the savage will become judge of the civilized man, and Natural Man the paradigm of a regenerated humanity (287).

Obstacles to French overseas expansion in Brazil arose when the Portuguese became more active in their own colonization of Brazil. In 1560, the Portuguese crown appointed Mem de Sá as Governor General of Brazil and directed him to expel the French invaders from the land, which Portugal still considered its lawful possession. After seven years of battle, the Portuguese succeeded in driving the French permanently out of the region around Rio de Janeiro for the remainder of the century. Despite France’s loss of its first Brazilian colony, influential texts narrating Brazil continued to shape French perspectives on the distant land. In the early 1600s, still enthralled by Brazil’s natural setting and its potential as a paradise for French colonization, France made another attempt at settlement in Brazil, this time on its northern coast. Marie de Médicis, regent to King Louis XIII, authorized a mission of French Capuchin monks who were sent to Maranhão, where the French founded Fort Saint Louis (present day São Luís) in 1611. This Roman Catholic mission, chronicled by Father Claude d’Abbeville in Histoire de la mission des pères capucins en l’isle de Maragnan (1614), aspired to extend France’s political and religious domains in the New World by settling this region, which Abbeville called la France Equinoxiale (Equinoctial France). In addition to gaining significant insight into indigenous Brazilian culture and society, the French selected several natives considered most inclined to French virtues, and brought them back to Paris. There they were converted to Christianity, baptized with new names based on some of the most exemplary French nobles, and lived at Louis XIII’s court, providing much fascination for the French royalty and others curious to encounter the foreign presence among them. In the end, however, this mission was no more successful than the earlier one, as the Portuguese army attacked the French settlement, whose members were forced to abandon their colonial aspirations and return to France after spending only four years in northern Brazil.

Following France’s failed attempts to colonize Brazil in both Guanabara Bay in la France Antarctique and Maranhão in la France Equinoxiale, concerted interactions between Brazil and France in South America were brought to a halt for the rest of the seventeenth century. Yet in the eighteenth century, when encounters between French and Amerindians reported in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century travel narratives were again read by learned men and women in France, French Enlightenment historians and intellectuals reassessed the contemporary state of both Brazilian and French culture and civilization. In Histoire générale des voyages (1757), Abbé Prévost draws directly on Thevet’s and Léry’s narratives to reassess French and Portuguese interactions with Brazilians and concepts of behavior, custom, and cultural relativity. Guillaume Raynal, in Histoire des deux Indes (1770), comments on passages in Léry’s work in order to expose, now from the perspective of Enlightenment thought, Tupinambá modes of reasoning that reveal the virtuous nature of their behavior and cultural practices, in contrast to some of the irrational dimensions of those of the French. Prévost and Raynal thus established more explicit conceptions of the Brazilian bon sauvage (noble savage) that became a principle at the foundation of texts written by highly influential French philosophers such as Denis Diderot, who contributed to Raynal’s work, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who expanded the paradigm to address the universal notion of human rights. French novelists of the late eighteenth century such as Jacques-Henri-Bernardin de Saint-Pierre drew on narratives that described exchanges between the Tupinambá and the French registered in sixteenth-century travel writing and works by French Enlightenment thinkers to dream up new fictional possibilities in encounters between Brazil and France.

In the eighteenth century, when the Portuguese colony was growing in size and strength, Brazilian thinkers conceived of their land as possessing its own unique sociocultural and political characteristics. During this period, the Brazilian neoclassical literary movement known as Arcadismo (1768-1836) emerged as a means of communicating a national perspective on the transforming Brazilian society. Arcadismo, or neoclassicism, was inspired by Virgil’s Eclogues (43-47 BCE), a collection of pastoral poems set in Peloponnesian Arcadia, Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), which transposed Virgil’s idealized Arcadian society into the setting of contemporary Italian intrigue, and the themes and vocabulary used by the actors of the French Revolution. As an Arcadist theme, nature appeared in literary works such as Tomás Antônio Gonzaga’s volume of poetry Marília de Dirceu (1792); in Cláudio Manuel da Costa’s late eighteenth-century poems, reason appears as equivalent to metaphors of the Enlightenment (Rouanet 332).

As in the Arcadian intertexts, Arcadismo was idyllic but politically oriented, and its development reflected the transforming ideological situation of late eighteenth-century Brazil. Sharing the same ideals as the French Revolution, a group including members of the Brazilian clergy, military, and the educated middle-class organized themselves around an anticolonial movement that developed into an incipient nationalist program. This energy, spread in the literary production, came momentously from the outbreak of several nativist movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, among which some aimed only at reforming the colonial strictures and others at Brazil’s total separation from Portugal. The Inconfidência Mineira (Minas Conspiracy), an unsuccessful independence movement of 1789, was a rebellion reflecting the latter trend, and the conspiracy created an anti-Lusitanian spirit in Brazilian culture, arguably one of the most apparent motivations leading to the pursuit of embracing French political and cultural ideas into Brazilian thought.

Led by an enriched oligarchy rebelling against the colonizer’s tax collection over gold production, the Inconfidência Mineira, according to Sérgio Paulo Rouanet, was particularly articulated around a língua da Ilustração (language of the Enlightenment) (331). References to the political glossary of the 1789 Minas Conspiracy, such as anticolonialism, the rejection of despotism, God, and militarism, among others, also resonated in the Brazilian Arcadist production at large (Rouanet, 334-40). The revolutionary spirit in Brazil thus paralleled that in France, whose Revolution began in the same year, as the two countries experienced similar impulses aiming at calling into question and overthrowing dominant power structures.

In this context, it is important to note that not only Brazilian men reacted to the developments of the French Revolution but also, on the feminist front, the 1791 La Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, written by Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793)—the strong retort to the infamous 1789 La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen that cost her her life—was followed by the 1832 book, Direitos das mulheres e injustiça dos homens, written by Brazilian Nísia Floresta (1810-1885). In her call for education, professional training, and respect for women, Floresta also drew on the 1792 treatise Vindications of the Rights of Woman written by Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797). Even if less confronting than Gouges’s and Wollstonecraft’s demands in their own clamor for the cause of women, Floresta’s ideas are a sign of more modern mores in Brazil and set the tone for a few brave women to follow her steps in the nineteenth century and beyond.

At that juncture, as a result of the Peninsular War with France (1807-1814), Brazil found itself in a peculiar situation as the Portuguese court selected its largest colony for self-exile upon the Napoleonic troops’ invasion of Lisbon, and relocated to Brazil in 1808. Upon arriving in Salvador, Bahia, Prince John VI of Portugal announced the Decree of Opening the Ports to Friendly Nations, which did not include France, but moved on to locate the seat of the United Kingdom of Portugal in Rio de Janeiro, the only Latin American colonial village to be the capital of a European metropolis. Interestingly too, as part of a set of modernizing initiatives, John VI welcomed self-exiled specialists in painting, architecture, sculpture, and various trades, from none other than the artistic entourage that once worked for Napoléon Bonaparte in France. Thereby John VI sponsored the Artistic Mission of 1816 to help launch the School of Fine Arts and promote public taste in Brazil. And so in the nineteenth century a cultural exchange between Brazilian and French intellectuals and artists intensified. Brazilians visited Paris, while French intellectuals went to Rio de Janeiro—some to stay for life.

Librarian by profession and a studious enthusiast of Brazilian culture, Ferdinand Denis lived in Rio de Janeiro from 1816 to 1821 and sketched the first periodization of Brazilian literature. He is known for having created the traceable heritage of Brazilian culture with his 1826 Résumé de l’histoire littéraire du Portugal, suivi de l’histoire littéraire du Brésil. Notwithstanding the ambivalence of Denis’s principles and his prescriptive intent, his ideas were crucial for Brazilian Romanticism in particular and in the whole helped in the elaboration of a literary culture later recognized as specifically Brazilian. Brazilian Indianist literature, for instance, was formed from this local perspective that Denis suggested as it also derived from both François-René de Chateaubriand’s style and other discussions popularized by Denis in Brazil.

The nationalist slant appeared particularly in the decades following the 1822 independence, when Brazilian intellectuals produced literature to achieve cultural emancipation from Portugal. Reflecting French and other European vogues attuned to the Romantic ideals of self-determination, both at the individual and social levels, Brazilian intellectuals assumed that the natural environment of their country was the perfect scenario in which to look for a primordial history. Hence Brazil’s indigenous characters emerged as the best raw material for national literature. Indianism elaborates on the country’s origin, taking into consideration the new valorization of American nature, also using historical data from European travel literatures. Antônio Gonçalves Dias, who published poetry such as Canção do exílio (1846) and a dictionary of the Tupinambá language, and lawyer, politician, and novelist José de Alencar, one of the earliest writers of Brazilian Romanticism, who wrote the Indianist trilogy O Guarani (1857), Iracema (1865), and Ubirajara (1874), offered the best and most enduring models of the Romantic Indianist genre that lasted roughly from 1840 to 1870.

The nineteenth century was also the period of the Brazilian First- and Second-Wave Feminisms, as Constância Lima Duarte has rightly emphasized (152, 156), when women started asserting their prerogative to participate fully in society beyond their roles exclusively inside the ossified slavocrat and patriarchal family. At a time when French cultural trends markedly impressed Brazilian writers, the press, such as it was used in France, became an important tool for writers who also became journalists. Brazilian women also seized the opportunity to circulate liberating ideas and founded newspapers advocating the raising of women’s consciousness toward emancipation. A few notable examples of the works of Brazilian female journalists include the pioneering Joana Paula de Noronha’s Jornal das senhoras (1852-1855), Júlia Sandy Aguiar’s O belo sexo (1862), Francisca da Motta Diniz’s O sexo feminino (1889-1890), and, alluding to the Republic’s Proclamation date, her O quinze de novembro do sexo feminino (1889-1890), to name a few (see Buitoni).

Widely read French novelists, including Honoré de Balzac, critic Hippolyte Taine, with his infamous historicist dictum race, milieu, et moment (nation, environment, and moment), and his follower in scientific and inquisitive methods, naturalist Emile Zola, are some of the key influential French intellectuals who generated the assessment Brazilians carried out in their country. Such novelists also impressed women’s imaginations: writer Maria Benedicta Câmara Bormann, for instance, was considered a skirted Zola for the perceived naturalism of her scandalous novel Lésbia (1884). This scientific and naturalist scrutiny produced the two strongest trends of the period in Brazilian literature: the urban novel of individual, bourgeois contours and the investigative regionalist, sociological novel, which aimed at defining the Brazilian sociocultural density. At the same time, perhaps no other trace of Brazil’s enduring awe for fashionable Gallicisms is more conspicuous than in the positivist maxim Ordem e Progresso, printed on the Brazilian flag, a reduction of Auguste Comte’s legendary pledge L’amour pour principe et l’ordre pour base; le progrès pour but (Love as a principle and order as the basis; progress as the goal). The motto marks the end of the Monarchic regime, ousted in 1889 by republican groups of the army that inaugurated the First Republic in Brazil, which lasted until 1930.

At the fin de siècle, dealing with slavery was a prominent issue in Brazil, as international industrial capitalism demanded from Brazil a restructuring referring basically to a much delayed abolition, which occurred officially in 1888. Along the whole nineteenth century, slavery had divided opinions, as a more urbanized Rio de Janeiro, the capital of Brazil, allowed for prolific debate. Incentives and policies were developed in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century to deal with this issue as it related to the labor forces necessary after the end of slavery. Engineer Francisco Pereira Passos witnessed, as a Sorbonne student, the 1860s reconstruction of Paris by Baron Haussmann. Nicknamed um Haussmann Tropical (a tropical Haussmann), as mayor of Rio de Janeiro between 1902 and 1906 he started the remodeling of the city during a period named Bota-abaixo (Bring it down). The slum houses in the center of the city were removed and the area was civilized to become more like other international metropolises. Paris in particular served as a model, with its grand avenues, boulevards, and imposing buildings such as the Municipal Opera House in Rio de Janeiro’s neighborhood of contemporary Cinelândia.

Despite the capital’s major revamping during the tropical belle epoque, this period came to be known in Brazilian intellectual history as premodernism. Parnassian and Symbolist fads were in vogue and writers emulated the lifestyle of city expérimentateurs. Journalist and playwright João do Rio was one of its prototypical figures as his persona blended the flâneur Charles Baudelaire and the decadent Oscar Wilde. On the other side of the spectrum, writer Lima Barreto was the dissenting voice who did not celebrate the belle epoque but rather criticized its vanity and forceful gentrification. In her novel A luta (1911), writer and prestigious journalist Emília Moncorvo de Melo touches on the social divide in urban Brazil, and exposes the moral split in the existent separation between the middle- and upper-class married women in opposition to the less privileged ones, the so-called women of easy virtue. Referring to the well-known discontent with the deceiving petit bourgeois comfort of married life, Melo named her protagonist the Bovary da rua das Marrecas (Bovary of Marrecas Street), alluding to the heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s novel.

In the second decade of the twentieth century, a project to advance a sense of nationality in Brazil stirred intellectuals, artists, and wealthy patrons of the Paulista coffee aristocracy, who advanced a modernist movement in Brazil. This movement became synonymous with the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (Week of Modern Art of São Paulo). At its heart, the Semana de Arte, marking the anniversary of the independence of Brazil, proposed a rediscovery of the country. There is a number of important artists in this movement but Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) emerge as the most accomplished synthesizers of it.

Back from Paris, where he engaged with the Cubist and Futurist art circles, in 1912, Oswald de Andrade announced the need to align Brazilian culture with technical advances and artistic forms free from academicism (Brito 87). It is around this time that Mário de Andrade confessed his and Oswald’s intent, as modernist agitators, to cause a commotion. His plan, as a rediscovery was concerned, was to trace Brazilian folklore, which eventually resulted in his 1928 book Macunaíma, o herói sem nenhum caráter (the hero without any character), one of the masterpieces of Brazilian literature, a juxtaposition of myths and legends.

Mário was the studious collector of national artifacts and Oswald was an irreverent and more mordant cosmopolitan. His poetry and 1924 Manifesto Pau-Brasil are built with humor and both comment on the Brazilian variation of the Portuguese language and culture and retell Brazilian history. In 1928, Oswald published his much celebrated Manifesto Antropófago, a synopsis of this writer’s most representative ideas; the core concept of the Manifesto counters the idea that Brazil lacks in anything. With it, Oswald details the disservice imposed by European colonization and discourses—francesismos (Frenchnesses) in particular, as they were the most pervasive.

Some years later however, Mário appraised the whole modernist artistic enterprise countering Europeanisms. In a 1935 article, in which he recognizes the intellectual dominance of French thinking and styles in Brazil through the 1800s, he observes the waning of such an authority because it became obvious to him that Brazil had undergone a significant intellectual and cultural growth (Andrade 3). In his final checks and balances, as he also warns against the forceful advances of the United States, Mário ultimately expresses a favorable opinion. He says that the sway of French ideas in Brazil was praiseworthy, and still is the best, the one that balances us the most, … the one that least demands from us the renunciation of ourselves (benemérita, e ainda é a melhor, a que mais nos equilibra, … a que menos exige de nós a desistência de nós mesmos; 5; translation by Regina R. Félix). Such an endorsement of the French could only come from this great intellectual, able to look face-to-face into this long trade of ideas and products and highlight its best legacy. Such a stance reminds us of at least two other twentieth-century French intellectuals who went through life-changing experiences in Brazil: anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Lévi-Strauss saw his career transformed by his study of midwestern Brazilian indigenous peoples in the 1930s, the results of which were recorded in his groundbreaking Tristes Tropiques. Sartre visited the city of Salvador, Bahia--the Brazilian center of Négritude--to encounter the brothers of the Black Orpheus, whom he addressed in his 1948 introduction to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (1948; Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry in French). They are some of the most significant thinkers besides, more evidently, Léry, Montaigne, Rousseau, and Denis, who benefited from the exquisite mélange of tropicalidade (tropicality) and l’esprit gaulois (Gallicism) so crucial to connections between Brazil and France.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the mutual impact between France and Brazil developed in novel ways, largely in the realm of popular culture, which went beyond the principally intellectual exchanges of earlier periods in order to disseminate an awareness of the contact between Brazil and France to an expanded public. Cinema became an important medium that filmmakers used to convey the significant connections between the two nations. Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s film, Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (1971), whose dialogue is spoken almost entirely in the Tupinambá language, portrays conflicts between the Portuguese and the French—and their respective Amerindian allies—during the colonization of Brazil in the sixteenth century. Inspired by Hans Staden’s, Thevet’s, and Léry’s narratives of the European attempts to colonize Brazil, other contemporary Portuguese and French historical documents, and Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago, dos Santos draws on the concept of the anthropophagous practices of the native Brazilians as a paradigm of postcolonial thought in order to advance a commentary in his film, emblematic of the Tropicália movement, about the controversial state of Brazilian politics in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The present trend of anthropological, ethnographic, and cultural studies, with a postcolonial slant on early modern Brazil among French and Brazilian intellectuals alike, is testimony to the enduring importance of relations between the two nations that was begun several centuries earlier. The first modern English translation of Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage, which is widely read in academic circles today and has immensely influenced current ethnological thought, was published in 1990. This sparked an international interest in the work, which led to the republication of Léry’s five editions of Histoire d’un voyage in 1994. Jean-Christophe Rufin’s historical novel Rouge Brésil (2001; Brazil Red), which is set on an island in Guanabara Bay during the first period of French colonization of Brazil, has brought Villegagnon’s colonial venture into the literary sphere of the twenty-first century.

Frank Lestringant’s rich theories of the relationships between the concept of the Brazilian anthropophage and its effects on interpretations of the state of French society in the sixteenth century have been widely read in France, Brazil, and the United States. His works, such as Le cannibale: Grandeur et décadence (1994), Jean de Léry, ou, L’invention du sauvage (2005), and Le Brésil de Montaigne (2005), have motivated reassessments of early modern exchanges between Brazil and France, especially as they pertain to current concepts of cultural, ethnological, and transnational studies. In scholarly circles, numerous colloquia and conference panels have been dedicated to new theories related to the colonial era in sixteenth-century Brazil and many collections of articles that analyze this crucial period in Brazil-France relations have been published in recent years.

The number of Brazilian scholars devoting themselves to the study of the impact of French politics and ideas in Brazil is too large to mention here, as the Brazilian sociopolitical system has been dialectically formed in constant contact with foreign ideologies and cultural movements. The presence of the French input is felt in the shaping of Brazilians’ taste for art, architecture, fashion, film, food, literature, travel, and so on. The most recent outpouring of historical and literary research dealing particularly with France, which in fact is not so new anymore, is that coming from the period around the year 2000, on the occasion of the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the so-called discovery of Brazil by navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral. Noteworthy are the 1992 study Tempo e História, edited by philosopher Adauto Novaes, whose organizing timeline reflects the impact of French politics and ideas in different periods of Brazilian history; and the voluminous 2008 Dossiê França Antártica, an account of the international seminar The Universe of Antarctic France, held in 2005 at the National Historical Museum in Rio de Janeiro, which gathered significant specialists on the topic.

In the twenty-first century, Brazil and France have continued their long heritage of sociocultural, literary, artistic, and intellectual interactions, and such mutually beneficial exchanges have led to celebrations of the ongoing relationship between the nations. France named 2005 L’Année du Brésil (The Year of Brazil), which highlighted its relations with Brazil in fields such as literature, the visual arts, politics, economics, science, and technology with exhibitions, seminars, and performances; Brazil reciprocated France’s overt interest in its society by identifying 2009 as O ano da França (The Year of France). This mutual admiration continues to this day: in 2013, the Consulate General of France in New York City hosted France-Brazil: A Celebration of Cooperation & Friendship, an event that brought together the consuls general from both nations and a host of political figures and cultural personalities to commemorate the enduring connections between the nations. In addition, the oldest department store, Le Bon Marché, celebrated its 160th anniversary offering Brazilian products in the Le Brésil Rive Gauche marketing event between April and June of 2013. The mutual cultural interests of Brazil and France in the twenty-first century are certain to continue to reinforce the important roles that each nation plays in their relationship in the future.

Critical Studies of Brazil-France Cultural Exchanges

The enduring legacy of the interactions between France and Brazil treated in Cultural Exchanges between Brazil and France thus reinforces the current relevance of the volume, which is the first collection of studies written in English by a group of international scholars who address important relationships between Brazil and France from early modernity through the twenty-first century. The eleven studies in the volume, which are presented in chronological order of the exchanges that they address, are organized into